Tangle-resistant headphone cable
28th June 2008 – 10.23 amWhen I wrote about my new Denon AH-C551 headphones recently I purposely ignored one of the advertised features of the headphones. Or, rather, of the cable. On the box, and on the Denon's web page for the AH-C551 headphones, the cable is noted to be 'tangle-resistant', which I refused to acknowledge on the grounds of it probably being nonsense. Or at least self-affirming nonsense, the kind of statement a company could make where people would only notice the difference because they were told about it.
I have to admit that I was forever untangling the cable of all of my previous sets of headphones after pulling them out of my pocket with my iPod, no matter how carefully I tried to store them in the first place, and yet this new cable doesn't seem to suffer anywhere near as much. Of course, there are occasions when the headphone piece gets caught in a loop and needs to be unwound before the cable is pulled in to a knot, but for the most case the cable comes out of my pocket and almost unravels itself, letting me put on the headphones with much less of a struggle than before.
I could have been duped by the marketing, but I'm not sure. I was sceptical, yet am seeing a definite and significant decrease in the amount of untangling I am having to do than before. A minor difference, but a pleasant one.
One Response to “Tangle-resistant headphone cable”
Hey Pj,
I just noticed your post and we have been so annoyed with headphone tangles that we invested heavily in developing some IP to put it to bed. In our investigation we found some amazing research which goes to shows that length / area and elasticity all play pretty major roles in tangles.
Here's a blatant link to a recent post on out site, but click on the link of the researcher & download their PDF. It is a bit "reportish" though the discussion parts and charts are interesting - it may help with your gut feel on your Denon Headphones.
http://blog.budtrap.com/2008/06/apple-headphone.html
You may also be interested in our product that will be launching on July the 11th - yep, works with iPhone, iPod etc & isn't an annoying piece of dangling plastic - feel free to drop me a line and I hope you find this report interesting.